


Rex Interfectus Est

by raedbard



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:37:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No friends, no real friends, no children, no glory, no memoirs. Well fuck them." </p>
<p>The king is dead, long live the king. Sam's perspective on the passing of the kingdom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rex Interfectus Est

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zauberer_sirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/gifts).



> For Zau for Yuletide 2012. It's not quite as epic as I would have liked it to be, but I hope you enjoy it all the same. <3

“Do you think,” he says, once they’ve finished, in the gap between orgasm and the next time the phone starts to ring, “That we could settle down and have a couple of kids?”

She is lying with her head on his chest, tucked under his chin where his skin is warm. He’s been saying things like this, lately, since the inquiry, it's been happening more and more -- wistful little comments backed up with a solid chunk of sarcasm and a whiskey chaser. 

“I mean, the vaguely presentable ones that aren’t just pink booby-trapped packets of vomit and shit waiting to fucking explode at the slightest provocation. There are some kids like that, right? Polite, stable, not entering the world with a fucking iPhone and an enormous sense of fucking entitlement glued to their tiny pink heads. That isn’t just some fantasy that I was having?”

“You were fantasising about having children?”

“Just the kind that don’t leave wee piles of chunder in my shoes of a morning. Maybe you can only get them at John Lewis, you know, never knowingly under-sicked.”

He sighs.

“I think when they get older it’s not quite as focussed on bodily fluids. There’s walking and talking, all kinds of stuff.”

“Aye, that’s what they’ll tell you, darling. What he’ll tell you. Of course then it’ll all be about his bodily fluids. I mean, it already is, he’s just hoping you won’t notice.”

“Richard.”

“Yes. Fucking _Richard_.”

“You know, I actually counted up the number of minutes I spent with him in an average month once.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It was about the same amount of time as I spend making you coffee.”

He laughs, or at least releases a small puff of breath into the air above their heads.

“Aye,” he says again, for no reason in particular.

He has to wind himself down like this. The watch that runs him slowly comes to a complete stop, usually at three in the morning in her bed in her shitty flat in Clapham. Small bursts of hatred that mark the hours with decreasing accuracy, stretching the minutes out until they warp and split. And when she says ‘Malcolm’ for a second he looks at her like he’s expecting an insult to spit out of her mouth, then he remembers. 

With his clothes off he looks like a P.O.W. after a couple of decent meals doled out by American G.I.s, a man mysteriously marooned in the present day from a much earlier era, missing the kind of collar that fixes with studs and cigarette stains on his fingers. She expects the ashes she cannot taste in his mouth. She worries about the way his muscles seem to drain out of him as the years pass and how many of those years it’s taken for her to be able to look at Malcolm Tucker, king of spin, naked in her bed without wincing a little.

Tonight he's restless. 

It's been building, hurricane-ing around in him and bursting out every few weeks, visiting devastation on her flat, the pigeons in St James' Park and Nicola Murray. That's the thing about opposition: it just doesn't suit him. And it doesn't seem like two years to her, more like an endless series of listless Sunday afternoons, reading the Observer and wondering what the Coalition can fuck up next, vaguely wondering what they'll be wanting to do about it back at the office tomorrow. To him, she thinks, it's being locked in an isolation cell and being put on a bread and water diet for an unspecified amount of time while you can still hear a really good party going on in the next cell block over.

Tonight he's thinking about the Inquiry. About Ollie fucking Reeder, that tiny cunt. She keeps expecting to find a document on his laptop entirely composed of the word 'legacy', repeated until the it begins to lose its cohesion. She keeps expecting him to start drinking a lot, but if anything he's gone sober. His last place to hide is here, but he's just not very good at hiding.

Later, in the glow of an iPhone.

“Well, we’ve been together now for ... what, seven fucking years, haven’t we?”

“It's ten, Malcolm.”

“Ten?”

“Count it backwards, I know you can do it.”

“Fucking … ten years? Ten!? Was there some kind of fucking … wormhole that I wasn’t fucking aware of?”

“Possibly.”

“Fuck.”

“Good fuck or bad fuck?”

He laughs, a little gurgle in his throat. 

"You tell me, darling."

"Not one of your better ones."

"Oi. Fucking cow."

She smiles, kisses his throat where it meets his chest.

“I don’t remember when we started … this.” He looks at her, brushes the hair away from her eyes. “Do you remember?”

“The days all kind of bleed together.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

*

She was twenty-two when she came to work here, late of her father’s furniture business and before that a Russell Group university that meant she didn’t suffer from the innate sense of inferiority that everyone below the Cabinet and senior civil service who had gone to the trouble of getting into Oxbridge and not gone on to conquer the country felt. London had seemed like a good idea then, far away from the proud new kingdoms of the north where she had been educated and quickly realised that would be leaving once her three years were up and after working for the University from which she graduated for six months and for her father for seven, she thought it couldn't possibly be worse at the heart of government; surely the London shits couldn't be any worse than the Durham ones, after all, half of the were the same bloody bunch of complete twats.

An ex-boyfriend got her the interview and seemed to think that it entitled him to at least a handjob for old time's sake and the satisfaction he got from laughing behind her back at the slimness of her chances of getting the position. She photocopied the offer letter and sent it to him with 'your place or mine?' written on it in red marker pen. Little bugger never called her back.

She liked him at first because he was the only person who was reliably pleasant to the cleaners when they bustled in, middle of the night or six o'clock in the morning when everyone was dreaming of their beds, armed with blue plastic bags and squirty bottles, ready to conquer the surfaces of the mighty. It wasn’t that she was surprised that everyone was a complete bastard, it just got her down; confirmed her in her pre-existing belief that there are 

Always ‘thank you’ and ‘how’re you tonight’ and ‘how were your holidays, Joan? oh, fucking Malaga, lovely, I wish I was there right now, I tell you’. She realised she was listening for the insincerity she would expect, from anyone else, from every occupant of every rung on the festering ladder of this bloody place. But she never heard it. Which, at the very least, confirmed him as a human being and not some kind of incredibly sophisticated mecha-lizard. 

And he had been handsome then, not ragged and grey. Mephistopheles with the sea in his eyes and a ridiculous garden of hair. The hair got a little shorter every year that they were in power. His eyes reminded her of the opal in a bracelet she’d been given when she was a little girl: eight different colours under the light, something behind them that refused to be read. She used to think about them, on the tube back to her flat, reading a stupid novel that she wasn’t taking in and thinking about him. She was twenty-three and it was college all over again -- distant men in boring suits, shouting about their tiny penises and the influence, reputation and prowess thereof. She didn’t know, at the time, why she found herself feeling differently towards him. She decided, so she didn't have to give it any more thought, that it was because he is good at what he does, in contrast to so many of the other people working in this government. To an assistant, competence is always attractive, if only because if gives you some time away from having constant aneurysms at the eternal and unending stupidity of people who earn three times as much as you.

Later, she thinks it was his eyes. Later still, she's sure it was.

He wasn't a legend then, just a vaguely sweary man who was slightly better at being sweary and borderline psychopathic than anyone else who was vying for the title. Legends were waiting to be made and looking back they seemed inevitable, but weren't -- without a well-placed heart attack and a couple of Faustian pacts, and the efforts of a dedicated sweary Scotsman, it might never have happened.

When she was moved to his office everyone gave her tea and sympathy to her face and high-fives and the relieved exhalations of a secret sweepstake behind her back. No one actually expected her to last more than a month; she was the quiet one, known for eating lunch at her desk and not having any friends, in this for a vaguely acceptable salary and the endless search for the keys to the locked box in which all the secrets of the government are kept. Everyone in His office, so the lore went, was either as fucking batshit as He was, or committed to Broadmoor in under a month. She preferred to look on it as the start of an awfully big adventure.

Her dad rings her on Sunday nights at times which it takes her a few weeks to realise coincide exactly with Antiques Roadshow coming on the telly and the weekly recrudescence of her mother’s obsession with Royal Doulton ware and asks her questions the secret purpose of which is to make her wonder what she is supposed to be doing in the communications office, with _that man_. It puzzles her at first because she would have thought that Malcolm was exactly the kind of man her father should warm to, after all, she's noticed the similarity and rolled her eyes at herself and then she thinks about it a little bit and understands that this is her father being protective, being ridiculous, doing his impression of a popinjay for her benefit. She expects him to begin a sentence, several sentences, with the words 'well, you're still my daughter, Samantha' and 'wouldn't you rather just come home?' but to his credit, he doesn't. He prefers, on the whole, to run out his limited profane vocabulary on the subject of what a poisonous tosser her boss is and then hang up with a 'goodnight, darling, sleep tight'.

Her friends, the few people she actually considers friends and not just warm bodies that happen to inhabit the same office as her for at least eighteen hours a day, also wonder what the fuck she thinks she's doing. The words 'soulless' and 'psychopathic fuckwit' and 'cunt' get thrown around a lot, but with less poetry than Malcolm is capable of, along with a lot of questions that begin 'why ... '. She doesn't know 'why', doesn't even think of it as a question -- it's her job, he's her boss, and it's simpler, if nothing else, to at least attempt to get on with your colleagues and anyway he's not _that_ bad, for crying out loud. Which is the point where one of the boys usually rolls his eyes, downs his pint, and opines that she's probably fucking him anyway, so what's the point trying to get any sense out of her.

Which, at the time, was completely fucking unfair.

*

"You know, you're exactly the sort of girl I like," he had said, smiling that smile that is much too full of teeth.

With almost anyone else, she would have had to struggle to keep her cool, not blush, not say something irretrievably stupid. With him it's like her favourite tutor from uni, a fucking dirty old flirt but he doesn't mean anything by it, and he likes her, likes her smart mouth on the infrequent occasions that it's come out to play. All he's missing is the ancient velvet smoking jacket and a little beard.

"You say that to everyone who brings you a cup of coffee every hour on the hour and leaves a six pack of Red Bull in your bottom drawer."

"I do not," he said, shoving a pile of to-be-signeds off the end of her desk and perching there instead. "That is a vicious slander. I am very selective with my praise."

"In that you don't give any?"

"See, I do like you."

She smiled and re-crossed her legs, wondered if he'll take that as a hint, hoped he wouldn't. He raised an eyebrow, but nothing else.

He took her out for terrible pizza and a pretty good Zinfandel and that was when he asked her: ~how would you fancy earning almost thirty quid more a year and all the abuse you can stuff up somebody else's arse? and she asks him what the hell he's talking about and he tells her, with a little scrunched smile that ripples his cheeks and pinks a slight blush over his earlobes, that his PA had fucked off -- _taking all the fucking secrets with her as well, I'll have you know, a tiny little black briefcase, she thought she was fucking M in the remake of fucking Goldeneye_ \-- and he was actually fucking floundering without her, it's actually fucking impossible to survive without someone like her. Maybe someone like you. And after a few minutes of spluttering she had said yes and then he said _I've got all the papers here with me, I'll just open a vein so you can sign your soul over to my safe-keeping in the traditional manner_.

She does the things a good PA does: anticipates, alleviates, diverts and points up. She learns the art ( _the dark arts, oh you're his bloody disciple now, aren't you, bloody little priestess_ ) from watching him, and more, from watching everyone around him and the way they all begin slowly to drown whenever he calls up the ocean from his eyes. Sometimes, on his way to a meeting, about to break into his epically ridiculous run for the couple of feet between his office and the PM, he throws a look over his shoulder at her: what do you think, not so fucking bad, eh? And she grins and gives the kind of nod that everyone else would miss, but he wouldn't.

The first time he fucks her he is gentlemanly, old-fashioned, or how she would have imagined old-fashioned to be back before she was spoiled by the greasy fumblings of the old boys of minor public schools and that one bloke from the _Mirror_ who she tries really hard to believe was just a bad dream. She likes to hold his name in her mouth, the roundedness of it, and then let it out as she is coming: a petty incantation, but effective.

He contains his violence, lets it break only in long waves against her body, when she asks for it, with her hands and her mouth. He curls up against her skin and smiles and laughs and his eyes are the occasional blue of English shorelines in April, easily clouded over.

They're careful, not that it matters -- everyone thinks they're already at it anyway. And she's careful not to say anything and he's even more careful and it carries on like that, in jubilation and tribulation but mostly just in caffeine and vodka Red Bulls and in her bed in Clapham, and just once in his office, in his special chair, after which she politely refused to be the one to clean up the inevitable mess.

It falls off as he spirals, as he begins to throw off sparks, spinning faster and faster, no pun intended, until he is a blur at the corners of her day, never coming to rest because the consequences of rest would just be too awful. Eventually it's bad pizzas again, fumbles at Christmas again, and 'how was your evening?' and knowing that he was at home, echoing, bouncing his frustration off the walls like a tennis ball.

She got off with Richard after the last office Christmas party of the real government, when everyone was either obviously depressed or in the middle of a manic episode, and somehow it’s lasted long enough that he’s met her parents and left a heap of his shit in her flat. He’s hardly ever actually in England, let alone London, which suits her fine. She suspects Malcolm of posting fish to him by recorded delivery, or, on the one or two occasions they spend the night together again, wanking off into one of the cashmere socks he’s left in her drawers. She is always trying to work out, when he’s actually here, whether she dislikes him enough to give him the push; so far it’s just a struggle to have any strong emotion about him at all, which has its advantages. It’s not like she’s home that much either.

She sat behind him at the Inquiry and wondered how it was that she wasn't feeling more: it had felt pretty fucking acute in his bed the night before, when he was hard and desperate and knowing, but there's nothing much left now, just her hands folded on her lap and his glasses on the table in front of him, reflecting the light, and his voice drifting to the ceiling, filling up the air like an expanding gas. Nothing much left.

*

The police let him out on bail, of course. She doesn’t ask about the actual sum mostly because she’s trying not to think about the whole situation at all, how inevitable it all was. She also tries not to notice the chicken-skin vulnerability of his throat, exposed without so much as a Paul Smith scarf or a buttoned-up collar against the wind. He looks like he's had a shower in someone else's cold piss. His lips have gone the liverish colour of old lipstick on a tissue and she wants to touch them. She has a momentary panic that he's going to have some kind of stroke, here on the steps and then realises that even now, Malcolm would never do anything so blatantly clichéd. Think of the fucking headlines, darlin'.

“Are you going to keep on doing this sort of thing?” she asks, arms crossed across her breasts because what's a pissed off little woman stereotype between friends, right? Her nails dig into her palms. It hurts, but not enough. She takes the plastic bag with his 'effects' in it out of his hand and opens the taxi door.

“Aye, probably, love, you know. Sort of a bit late to be changing the rules of the game at this point, right?”

“I’m struggling to think of anything else you could actually do, really,” she says, and then slams the cab door.

“I always wanted to get arrested. I was a very good boy at university.”

“I bet.”

“I only did stuff you can’t get arrested for in Scotland. We play by different rules up there, you know.”

“Yes.”

He won’t stop talking. She came to think, back during the first term, that he believed that if he stopped talking the world would actually collapse in on itself, sucked into a black hole of Tuckerism, impossibly heavy and impossibly fucked without his input.

“You’re a complete fucking cunt, do you know that?”

He smiles at her, and it’s the same expression he had then, standing on the doorstep of the police station. _Doesn't matter._

“Oh, I like this. This is a new development. You’ve been taking notes, haven’t you? I didn’t know that my propensity for creative profanity had pierced your tiny, dainty wee eardrums.”

“Oh fuck off, Malcolm.”

"Come on, darling, you know you're my fucking protégé."

"You're a -- "

"A cunt, yes, I know, you said."

She exhales a long breath. "Look, I've got some people lined up. They're mostly bastards but some of them are influential bastards. Agents, you know."

"Aye."

"So you'll talk to them."

"Yes."

When she reaches out to cup his cheek, just for a second, he takes her wrist and rubs his thumb over the jut of bone. His kiss nestles in the palm of her hand.

"If I said I'm sorry, would you slap my face?"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, you bloody perv."

Later on, in bed, as they're falling asleep, or as she's falling asleep, it's not like he's crying, not exactly. Something in my fucking eye, love. Something of a suspiciously similar size and shape to a fucking arrow. I'm fucking Harold Godwinson here, can you see the Latin start to stitch itself into my fucking forehead, fucking rex interfectus est. He beats his fists a little, but only a little; she's holding him too tight. It's all a little bit late, love, for all this. Going to have to learn how to retire. Going to have to learn how to be quiet and say no nicely to the people who keep on asking you to go on fucking breakfast television and talk about how fucked you were at the end, what a terrifying shell of a fucking parasite on the back of a fucking political system that no one fucking cares about anyway, who votes these days anyway.

It isn't enough to kiss him (and it's too much to promise, any of it, is too much) but that's all she's got.


End file.
